i think i would be terrified to actually know that. i haven't got a clue. i don't often make the same sort of movie twice in a row. it's always been whatever is next in my head. from a commercial standpoint i guess i've made some pretty inscrutable decisions - like following up rejected with a sprawling abstract film about human evolution - but it's really just been whichever ideas won't go away at the time. there always a lot of new things i'd like to try and i'm happy to still feel like i'm learning a lot.

How does patience play into your work?

with tricky scenes i've had to spend a couple months on getting just a few seconds of finished movie... but on average a short will take me around a year and half to two years. sometimes the most satisfying thing is coming up with the most minor of rewrites - something that improves the story while saving you from having to had animate a few connecting scenes - and you sort of sit there and realize you just saved yourself a solid month at the art desk, a week of photography, and a couple weeks of sound mixing.

Why the stance not to use your work for advertising or other commercial means?

it just has nothing to do with it. it would be like taking time off from the films to drive a cab or paint houses. i'm not rich but i don't need to take on random jobs that mean nothing to me. the goal is not to try and make as much money as i possibly can, the goal is to try and make good movies.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that is the case, people seem to pay you a lot of compliments. Do you see it that way?

i guess, maybe... though i think i'd prefer to be complimented with a nice gift basket and a bottle of wine.

wow you're really in luck, i actually keep a long list of album titles for all of my imaginary bands. i'm pretty excellent with album titles. i used to be pretty good at band names but for some reason lately it's all been about album titles. if it were a death-metal band i think our number one single would be bitches asking for ham sandwiches, sort of a rap-death-metal genre blending thing there, off the best selling album goat yelling like a man.

no, god i hope not. messages are dangerous territory. i think those films are more like sharing a specific feeling or a specific moment with people than plainly delivering sentences. they seem more like songs than essays. i think there's more content in a song. some of my favorite songs, i've listened to them maybe a thousand times and i still might not know what all the lyrics mean and maybe i've even misheard some of them, but i still get exactly what that artist was thinking and feeling in that moment in time and for a little while you're sharing that space - it's like a mood you can't really put into words. i think whatever was being expressed with i am so proud of you is in there and whatever you find or don't find is totally valid. as the writer you have to let it go. it's sort of like giving somebody a nice gift.... you sew them a nice coat and you enjoy watching them opening it and making them happy. but then you need to get the fuck out of there. it's theirs now, let them try it on and walk around and live in it. don't keep coming over and saying "how's it fit? did you notice i put pockets on the inside? those stitches were imported..."

i've just finished a very silly five minute cartoon for something that i can't really talk about yet... it will be fun to see people driven from the theater. i needed do so something goofy between proud and chapter 3, i don't think i could have made three long bill films in a row. i've also been working on a graphic novel for the first time, which has actually been developing into something quite good - i keep changing it around and improving it and the only downside is every time i elevate one section, i have to back and make everything else that much better. but the big albatross, chapter 3, will be next... i'll be animating it before the end of the year. i think 1 and 2 are some of the best things i've done and now i'll be doing my very best not to screw this whole thing up.

Interview by Nobuaki Doi, October 2009

Where do you feel short animation has its strong points compared ot feature length films or live action? Estonian animator Priit Parn once said that animation can condense time - if a live action film needs two and a half hours, animation can do it in 40 minutes. The same can be said about your recent films, I think. Watching I'm So Proud of You is like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. What a huge scale of time and space one short animation film can condense... Really surprising. What are your comments on the nature (or the possibility) of short form of filmmaking, and especially about short animation film?
 

short films can maintain a level of intensity that feature films can't, without exhausting or really irritating the audience. you can get away with stuffng in a lot more information per minute. when i see an action movie that's badly constructed, if it's just wall to wall set pieces and explosions, i can only last so long before my eyes sort of glaze over and i have to turn it off. you need to plant moments in there to let the audience take a breath and relax - that's true of comedies too. even with a short i'll find moments to give the audience breaks - it's like a piece of music, you always need to include a few rests. but by and large, shorts can sort of stay on the attack almost all the way through... i am so proud of you covers almost as much ground as feature films do in 22 minutes, and if it were much longer the audience would start to feel beaten over the head. it's a pretty relentless stream of information and images being thrown at you... everything will be ok is almost nonstop narration too. you can't really do that for 90 minutes, i think people would probably walk out. information in a feature has to be served in smaller doses. i read an article that studied the limits of the human attention span; it said even when a person is concentrating as hard as they can on a task or a story, their minds still wander off to daydream surprisingly frequently. we've all noticed new things in a movie the second time we've watched it because for whatever reason we happened to be unplugged for that moment the first time through. it's a bit strange to look back on now, but these chapters weren't really intended to be seen in a row. when we showed proud and ok together on tour i was careful to play a silly cartoon in between them to give the audience a chance to clear their heads. i'm not sure what will happen when someone eventually watches all three chapters back to back - almost feature film length - it will probably give them a giant headache.

Could you tell me your method of making human characters? It seems to me that the characters in your films (especially in Everything Will Be OK and I'm So Proud of You) are made-up not by caricaturing or simplifying elements of humanity (like animation in general). Every time I see your film, I come to feel the existence of a human itself...

thanks... visually bill is the most stripped-down character i've worked with, and that allows him to have much subtler moments. if a few grains of the pencil in his eyes goes a millimeter this way or that, his expression and demeanor changes dramatically to me. you always sort of know what he's thinking. and of course the rest of his character is in the writing and the delivery. he tries to be a good person, i think he's very easy to relate to and root for. and i really like the fact that he's made audiences cry yet he's never spoken a word in either short. i love silent films but i somehow hadn't realized until recently that bill's basically a silent film star.

What impressed and surprised me most in I'm So Proud of You is that although the film has many personalities and many episodes, all of them are really believable. What did you think about making up these personalities or episodes? Were they only from your imagination or from detailed research? What is important in making them believable?

i think the things you learn in non-fiction books and documentaries are always more strange and amazing than anything you could make up, and i'm trying to keep bill sort of in that area... if you go too far and get outlandish it would be harder to relate or to care about him. most of his moments are pulled from real life.... conversations i've had, dreams, science stories, moments i've pulled from my old journal.... many of the strange episodes in his family's history were inspired by obituaries and newspaper articles from the early 1900s. i think every writer does that to a degree, weaves things from their own lives into the bigger story.

Films by independent animators tends to reflect their personality or their way of thinking. To what extent are you identical with Bill?

he voices a lot of the things i wonder about or am afraid of. i've noticed that when i'm worrying about something if i put it in a movie or a story it bothers me a little less.

The narration is great in Everything Will be OK and I'm So Proud of You. The text itself is beautiful and has a strong power to evoke something in the viewers' imagination. Please tell me the importance of the written texts and the act of narration in these films. And why did you decide to narrate by yourself? What do you think about the relationship between narration and visuals in animation in general?

i really didn't want to do the narration for the first film but i was rewriting as i went along and mixing the sound entirely in my apartment. so i was the only person who was always around to record extra takes and try out new material in the middle of the night. i'm not a very good actor, i think a good actor is somebody who could have performed the narration perfectly in an afternoon rather than need a month of frustrated re-recording.
i don't know if it ever occured to me how integral the narration would become... getting the spoken words flowing just right was as important as getting the picture's editing right. it also drove the writing, there are some things that look brilliant on paper but sound stupid read out loud, and there were other things i could get away with performing that might look trite on the page. but i want the whole of it - picture, writing, sound, music - to sort of wash over you... i don't expect you to keep track of every detail being thrown at you in the narration and the picture... these stories should be overwhelming and maybe a bit confusing. it's a run-on stream of information and emotions that should sort of carry you along, tell you a little too much and maybe a little not enough, and let you to take from it what you like.

Everything Will Be OK and I'm So Proud of You use live action shots. How did you approach them? Were there any reasons that they should not have been hand drawn? (I always feel that the people are essentially alone when I see these films. I think one of the reasons is your use of live action shots. They have very distant feelings.

yeah, the live action windows really isolate the characters, they're obviously very detached from those environments. i guess you could say they're detached by an entire dimension. almost everything you see in every moment in both films is from bill's point of view - how he perceives himself, what he might hear offscreen and visualize, past events that he is picturing or imagining, dreams, all the little distracting images that pop in and out of our heads from moment to moment. and i think that relationship between the animation and live action elements will be pushed a little deeper in chapter 3.

yeah i think that's all correct. i'm not sure i'd call myself a fatalist, predetermination or defeatism doesn't make much sense to me. but i don't think most people are in control of much of our lives, either - for all the reasons you mention, like genetics, disease, and chance - and also because many people don't really choose to take control. very few of us really seem happy with what they have and actually appreciate their lives... i just read an article today that said americans are living longer than ever - cancer rates are way down - yet they are unhappier than ever, dissatisfied and vaguely frustrated all the time. and they've been fooled into being dissatisfied by the commerical culture around them - the last few generations, mine included, have been sort of sold this idea that they are all stars, that technology can make them happy, that it's ok to be selfish and "go get yours", that they all belong on tv talent shows... that becoming rich is somehow the goal of life. it's all a celebration of selfishness disguised as "individuality." i'm convinced that most middle class americans don't consider themselves middle class, but "not rich yet." and when those messages are being pounded at you all the time it creates a very unappreciative and unhappy way for people to live, always waiting for something else and never existing in the moment and looking around them. so when that plague suddenly comes or the asteroid strikes, it is sort of twice as tragic when they are suddenly shaken awake at the very last moment. it's kind of a tangent, but it is very similar to bill's story... he's suddenly facing something terrible and is forced to look at his life for the first time through these new lenses... suddenly the things that seemed so important are redundant and meaningless and everything looks new and surreal.

What do you think of the brain? Isn't it strange that a piece of meat inside our skull can imagine goddamn huge and even nonexistent worlds (like Bill in the latter part of I'm So Proud of You)?

i try to read a lot of neurology books (that is, i try to understand them), and the more i read the more baffling it all seems. the subconscious seems much more active (and much more brilliant and interesting) than anything going on in our heads that we're actually aware of. on the subject of not having much control of our lives, there are some spooky studies that strongly suggest that the subconscious is truly making every one of our decisions for us, and just giving us the illusion that we're steering the ship from moment to moment. every impulse, motivation, and idea that pops in our heads was thought up subconsciously a few seconds before, and we're merely carrying out the program as it's being fed to us. i can't wait until somebody uses this in their criminal defense trial.

Last question. I'm So Proud of You has a very interesting episode: "the passing of time is just an illusion." "All of history is fixed and laid out, like an infinite landscape of simultaneous events that we simply happen to travel through in one direction." This is exactly the same with the (narrative and visual) structure of Everything Will Be OK and I'm So Proud of You, isn't it? Every time I see these films I come to think that such a structure is really like the structure of our memory, our inner world. This is possibly a bad question...

no, you're absolutely right! the narrative of i am so proud of you jumps all over time and space for just those reasons. a film strip is a perfect example of this theory, too: we're advancing it in one direction but it does not mean the frames and moments behind us have ceased to exist, or that the frames ahead of us are not already there. it's a very beautiful physics theory and was perfectly suited for that film - in a sense, everything repeats, beginnings and endings again and again all at the same time. i don't believe that's necessarily predetermination either, i think free will still works even when the future is happening "right now." chapter 3 will probably be more similar to chapter 1, and settle back down to focus on one timeline again.